dodecaphonic

What I was trying to convey is that there are people with more than one name that are not their family names, but "middle name" as a concept does not exist in the same way it does in other cultures. It's not an expected component of a person's full name.

Brazilian here. Around these parts, middle names are not a thing. They don’t show up in forms, and also aren’t expected to exist.

When the names before the family names are multiple, we call them “nomes compostos” (composed/combined names). There are very common combinations, such as “Carlos Eduardo” and “Maria Clara”.

If someone named “Maria Clara Guimarães Schindhelm” fills out a form, they’ll say their given name is “Maria Clara”, with the rest being the surname.

Knowing where the given name ends is an exercise in pattern recognition. We have a sense of what’s a given name, and a sense of what’s a surname. It’s an imperfect system, though: some families have surnames that are also used as first/given names (a common one is “Francisco”).

Maybe you mean Concur? https://purescript-concur.github.io/purescript-concur-react/

The "mian" thing is not an error. It's there to make a point about how the brain interprets code, depending on your familiarity with the language and problem. She explains it not much later on.

The author of the post, Oskar Wickstrom, is building such a tool (he mentions it in passing) : https://quickstrom.io/

I've purchased one two months ago, and it's great. Ubuntu worked out of the box (the only exception being the fingerprint reader), and it runs smoothly. The screen is sharp, and it's super light. I'm happy with mine.

I recall paying for it in iOS, and getting a "it's free for a year" message on Android before the Facebook transaction.

Tim Jenison was interviewed by Leo Laporte on Triangulation (http://twit.tv/show/triangulation/118). They start talking about it between minutes 35 and 36, and he describes the process in a little more detail, including magnification, distance from the canvas and so forth

I had the opportunity to use it for a few weeks at work, when developing and Android app, and made the jump from the iPhone to a Nexus 4. Google Now is incredible. Last week I went to another city for a family funeral and the next day it was showing traffic to the place I slept, sights to see, etc. This weekend I was walking around town and a card showed up with movie times. It's little things that wow you and actually turn out to be useful.

The Android experience is very good now, but I would be lying if I said that app quality is nearly as high, especially in things like photography and audio. That still makes me think about whether my commitment is long-term.

I guess it's due to the extra work they have to do to put the proper amount of color on the sensor, as the Red EPIC they used tends to mute them a little bit.

I love the energy itself that people are putting into making the web more of an app development platform. It's commendable how strongly and energetically they push to get there, building cool demos and frameworks that on a relative scale (i.e. from the web of ten years ago to the web of today) seem magical. But, frankly, more and more I feel like you, and more and more all that effort seems wasted on bringing everything up to par with old desktop patterns and techniques when we could all instead push everything somewhere new.

Like you I write web apps, but I'm old enough/lucky enough to have had some other experiences, and to be quite honest I find even Gtk+ is more pleasant overall than the MV* framework of the month. That we have folks now trying to write AutoCAD or Photoshop in JavaScript just like a loss for our industry.

It seems pretty straightforward on the surface, for sure. However, considering just how convoluted phonegap, weinre and friends can get, it's not hard to believe it turned into a mud ball.

What greatly inconvenienced me about MobileOrg was having to manually push and retrieve changes from the app, which led me to the occasional "but I'm sure I've captured this!" moment. Call me stupid, or even inconsistent for hoping something a little more brainless (it's an emacs mode I'm trying to sync with, after all), but eventually it put me off from adopting it in full.

I was 14 and faced the same questions you do. I was surrounded by all these guys who could bend bits with their thoughts and had pointers and stacks for breakfast. They all used see and did stuff that seemed amazing to me at the time. Add to that the fact I felt more like a 'creative', in the narrowest of senses, so I was not sure how to reconcile both my interests, my friends were no help and I did not know much about the demo scene, nor of people like _why and the Processing guys.

Somewhere along the way I found Perl, and the way from A to B was not paved with incantations. It took me a copy of Randal Schwartz's "Learning Perl" and a Christmas Holiday to get really hooked — the immediacy of thinking and doing and making mistakes and fixing them was paramount to my believing programming was not only for the initiated.

While I second all the recommendations for having a mentor and working closely with knowledgeable people, I disagree with putting IDEs in the middle and choosing PROJECTS (more on that on a second). I sincerely think there's a great benefit to shortening the path between you and running code, and I believe dealing with compiler errors and linker spewage can be detrimental to the overall purpose of getting acquainted with code and thinking about programs.

About projects: having something as a goal is definitely a must; I don't object to that, but to all the baggage the term _project_ carries. Have something around which you'll structure your thought, but allow yourself to tinker and to put it in the backburner if it proves itself to be not challenging enough or too daunting a task for your current knowledge level. If you're neither having fun nor being challenged, you won't improve.

If you want specific tips on what tech to use, it would perhaps be better if you told us what you want to achieve. Do you want to code for the web, to take your designs to the next step, to code simple workflows?

Isn't it because of privacy issues? Google probably tried to avoid any Buzz-like backlash of people creeped out by them knowing who's who in their lives. Integration efforts like that can only succeed if people feel it's ok, which will come naturally if Plus succeeds.

Exercises in style do not make books (Raymond Queneau nonwithstanding). If you just try out a load of languages, learning what's possible but not doing anything with it, what's the point?

I don't think he is discouraging learning new stuff, looking at new techniques. What he is saying is that a solipsistic attitude about programming is a waste, and that resonates with me. I've seen many a time people who can make awesome demos of SLIME, have Haskell tricks up their sleeve, write languages on weekends, and yet ultimately do absolutely nothing. It's scholarly, for sure, but that's it.

To be fair, I agree that there's explorations to be done in this realm, but the sorts of explorations that create value on a visible scale tend to go hand in hand with some application. "ERLANG'S SO AWESOME" because its ingenuity meets reality quite rapidly, and you can build stuff with it. In a societal scale, that's the true value.

I've been on guilt trips because of the social aspect I'm missing (dojos, hackatons, weekly meetings in bars), but I've come to terms with it. I have a wife with whom I'd rather be, movies to watch and books to read. It's a tough balance, and ego-wise it can be brutal, but I'm aware now that after my commute home, I want to point my brain at different things.

The way I see it, the ultra-passionate, sleeps-eats-drinks code programmer is usually one who hasn't: a) learned to use his time parsimoniously; b) accepted there's a limit to how much you can do in one day; c) yet built a family. The last one, especially, if approached with gusto, will automatically make you ponder and weigh things -- and will also limit your time, fixing a and b if you don't fight it.

NativeClient is a cool technology, from a pure, geeky POV. Maybe awesome stuff will be done with it, to the point of steering other browsers in its direction, but right now it's a case of having a "Designed for Google Chrome" badge on you front page or developing two code bases, one with JavaScript, another with C++, just to have the same reach you would without it -- only to end up with a crappy user experience for a lot of people.

The only way I see of furthering NaCl's agenda is if Adobe, Autodesk or some other company with a little cash to burn decides to write one of their apps (say, a Photoshop Express, or maybe a Sketchbook Pro) with it and prove in the market that there's a future in that approach. Otherwise, it will forever be just a cool hack.

I'd argue that the reason I can keep using Linux is knowing there's good (or good enough) stuff out there for me to use, the only requirement being that I have a modern browser and an Internet connection. There's less and less reliance on some group of people deciding to clone some existing project or create something from scratch -- boy, do I remember the days of diving deep into freshmeat.net just to find something that would open PDFs and not suck.

The UX thing is why I'm slowly warming up to the Chromebook idea. I own an iPhone, and I love Macs, but I think ultimately the constraints of native applications will work against the users. We should cherish the million frameworks showing up instead of raising the "too much choice" flag just yet, as they will (hopefully) yield a development experience as enjoyable as the current tools for iOS, Android and Windows Phone seem to.

Yes. Ubuntu is particularly good in that regard. I've tried to run Fedora for a month and, man, is that thing brittle or what?

Regressions abound. I've been bitten more than once by X server upgrades, driver changes and kernel fix-ups that made my otherwise linux-friendly laptop go hayware. For a year now I've had to run my system with KMS polling turned of -- otherwise, I can't move my trackpad without getting 100% cpu usage by kworker processes.

A paper detailing the technique was presented in SIGGRAPH a good year, year and a half, before Adobe added it to CS5.

This. I have ascended to a managerial position a couple of years ago, rising from the ranks to steer what used to by a group of my peers. A lot of cruft had been ailing the team for years, but one guy stood out: he had been fired, rehired and now acted as if there was nothing he could do to damage his standing in the team. When we were peers, it bothered me; when I became his boss, I really tried to sway his attention into the product, into learning, into becoming more than a "drag this out of the component box" programmer.

Needless to say, it failed. The guy was irreparably lazy, and trying to get him excited about building the things we are fortunate enough to get paid to build only made him try to put me under a bus when he got the chance. I had to let him go, and have slept better ever since.

How to name your startup: be a regular guest on a well-to-do podcast that, while not being able to trademark its own name, has established quite a reputation. Create a friendly relationship with the host, put forth bad impressions when it's time to tip the hat and make everyone think you care. Then, on your spare time, create a podcast network with the very same name but to a word and claim you offered the domain to the guy you supposedly respected, since, well, it's not like he can claim to own that specific sequence of words, right? Success will then follow.

Sometimes I feel people writing this type of article decided to see the world through their window and ignore what goes around it.

I get the ways the iPad can be detrimental to software development and the perception of what constitutes legitimate use of a device, just as the iPhone was/is. However, to place it as an anti-creativity agent infiltrating our lives is either disingenious or misinformed.

There's no doubt different interests are at stake here, and that old media is trying desperately to feel in control again. But media consumption is but an use case for this and similar devices. To reduce it to that and ignore the amazing things people have been doing with their post-iPhone mobiles is to dumbly state only the issue of content distribution (written content, mostly) is relevant in this discussion.

Look at Everyday Looper, the many drawing apps, the games. You can argue any way you want about how it isn't an IDEAL situation, but there's vibrance in the community of developers, and a growing number of things users can achieve. I am not a musician, and I have been working beats. My drawing frustrates me a lot, but on my phone I feel free to sketch, and it allows me to spend my time in more creative ways than I would have a couple of years ago. And maybe, just maybe, all that arises from the perceived stability of the platform as opposed to Android (and its many versions): people can target it in code, people can use it and know it will be a thought trampoline, and that different trampolines will come out soon.

We all have our biases, and too easily frame situations as if our version of inside baseball were paramount to the fate of the world. While we do it, people will keep churning great ideas wherever they feel enabled to do so. Apple is kind of like New York, or Berlin, or Paris in that sense: there's much to dislike about it, but it provides enough of a cushion for creatives (including programmers), enough inspiration in the form of the works of others, to help make great things.